Autonomous Guided Vehicles for Smart Industries - The State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges.

Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are considered to be one of the critical enabling technologies for smart manufacturing. This paper focus on the application of AGVs in new generations of manufacturing systems including: (i) the fusion between AGVs and collaborative robots; (ii) the application of machine to machine communication for integrating AGVs with the production environment and (iii) AI-driven analytics that is focused on the data that is produced and consumed by AGV. This work aims to evoke discussion and elucidate the current research opportunities, highlight the relationship between different subareas and suggest possible courses of action.